When it comes to both coronavirus and climate change, the purist route is doomed to failure
handmaid tale zero carbon
Zero Covid is dead. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said as much last week, finally accepting that the delta variant has made it impossible for one country to eradicate a disease which has become endemic elsewhere.

For the moment, New Zealand persists with its miserable cycle of lockdowns, but, with cases rising anyway, Jacinda Ardern must surely soon bow to the inevitable.

We are destined, though, to go through the same cycle with Zero Covid's cousin, Net Zero carbon emissions. Both have similar ideological underpinnings: a belief that by mandating something to happen, the means to achieve it will magically come into existence. Both involve a refusal to balance huge, open-ended costs against other considerations, and both are driven by a desire to control the population via puritanical strictures.

Some have already demanded that similar measures be applied to Net Zero as were applied to the messianic pursuit of Zero Covid: "stay local" orders, flight bans, smartphone apps to track our behaviour.

Witness the words of former chief scientific adviser and founder of the "independent Sage" committee Sir David King, who wrote in the Washington Post: "the pandemic ought to make fighting climate change easier, serving as a kind of model for responding to the climate crisis. While it did so at a huge cost to the economy, it has proved that large swaths of the population could change their behaviour and lower the trajectory of emissions - not over decades but in a matter of weeks". In other words, let's have lockdowns for the climate. Indeed, Extinction Rebellion has seemingly tried to impose one in London over the last week.


Comment: King is wrong, so wrong. From the World Meteorological Organization:

Carbon dioxide levels continue at record levels, despite COVID-19 lockdown

Just as with viruses, man does not control CO2, Nature does!


As with Covid, as with climate change - the purist route is doomed to failure.

We can't just spirit carbon emissions away. For an advanced industrial economy to achieve net zero requires technology we simply don't have, and may never have. Zero carbon steel, cement, carbon-capture: all are either pie in the sky or far from being proven on a commercial scale.

The better option is the messier one. Just as we have tamed Covid with vaccines but accepted that we will have to live it, we have the option of adapting to climate change while using what technology we do have to trim emissions to much lower levels.

Gas rather than coal, hybrids rather than pure petrol or pure electric, adapted diets for farm animals to release less methane; such measures can quickly halve carbon emissions in their sectors without any sacrifice of living standards. We can go much further, too, with nuclear energy, hydro-electric power and reasonable contributions from wind and solar.

It is the absolutist quest for zero emissions by a fixed date that is the problem, which threatens to derail economies and make us poorer. One day, as with Zero Covid, our leaders will have their moment of realisation. But I fear it won't be any day soon.
The Denial by Ross Clark is published by Lume Books